Ubisoft's gamer survey first asks if you're female, and terminates if you say "yes"

boing
43

Yes, but even if it were a bug, how did it not get caught before release?

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Because they are a video games company?

Assassins-Creed-Unity-Bugs.jpg1024×576 109 KB

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46

It’s the token gator come to play!

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47

This was clearly a technical error, and you are causing more problems even reporting on it.

48

Yes, the video game industry, and the software industry as a whole, seems to lack QA often.

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49

For a few months I had a job doing market research over the phone (calling people at random from the phone book). Often the people employing us only wanted to research their key demographic (youngish), and so I would awkwardly reject people who’d agreed to take the survey but were (god forbid) “old”.

My job got immeasurably easier once I heard and copied one of my colleague’s patter who rejected people by explaining we’d already had enough respondents from that age group, rather than that they didn’t qualify for the survey because they were over a certain age.

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50

Because that’s totally what’s happening in this thread right now; people are screaming bloody murder, bandying their pitchforks and frothing at the mouth as they salivate for ‘retribution’ everywhere you look!

/s

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51

In what sense does it cause more problems if Boing Boing reports on an error?

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#JustUbisoftThings

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My parents don’t have a basement :frowning:

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54

It seems to me that most surveys are created by the person you don’t trust with anything important.

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55

In the same way that even discussing racism “perpetuates” it?

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56

the cynic in me wonders if it’s an reflection of their own internal staffing. “hey guys, take this survey before we send it out.” and, they didn’t have a woman in qa.

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The thing is, Ubisoft has a pretty spotty record on things like inclusiveness. While I don’t doubt this was just a simple survey bug, Ubisoft has a pretty poor reputation here.

Jim Sterling explains:

… and …

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58

A “technical error” caused by not giving a fuck about the input of women.

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59

I’m probably in software versus social science because I HATED the other people in my capstone team who wrote the dumbest, most leading and horrid questions for the surveys and research we were to perform. I’m sure they’re all marketroids.

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60

That doesn’t surprise me at all.

I was just referencing the way that so many of these kinds of posts seem to turn out, regardless to the original intent.

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61

Market Research pro here. Short answer: somebody, somewhere was cheap and also dumb.

If you only care about responses from a demo, you have 3 sane ways of doing it:

  1. only survey that demo
  2. Allow all completes and filter at the end
  3. Collect ALL demographic data and then terminate

Option 1 doesn’t work on a public survey; 2 is more expensive; 3 requires experience, and provides at least a little bit of cover.

To terminate PER QUESTION instead of terminating at the end of demo probing means 2 things: that they did this in-house instead of hiring a reputable firm, and that they likely don’t care about the results so much as they care about how they can use the results.

and Ubisoft’s response, that the survey is now “open to all” or whatever doesn’t untip their hand - the first thing they’re going to do with this data is filter out the women anyway.

This isn’t market research. It’s PR.

I am unimpressed.

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Well then I’m really SOL (despite being a regular player of one of their games)!

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